The Tier Experiments [ Comment ]Saturday, 12 February, 2011 at 6:16 PST | | Print NewsNews at the QUAKE Live site isn't about DevPick Servers this weekend, it's about an experiment in server joining that the team is running to help solve an issue that's caused more than a few requests, and that's joining games where the skill level is one tier down from the player's level. The dev team isn't sure what's going to happen, but they are watching this little experiment closely, so don't be shy about contributing some honest, thoughtful input. Here's the official word:

We've just enabled on the site an experimental new configuration for the next few days. We have disabled the ability to join servers one tier down (represented in the server browser by a gray down arrow).

This has been a highly requested change that we've had a lot of feedback about. To put it quite simply: we don't know, and want to find out what the effects of this will be. We've taken a look at our tier distributions, and everyone's player ratings, but in the interest of science, experimentation is the one true way to find out what will happen.

This may only be a temporary change. We're going to keep an eye out, and see what the feedback is like, and decide where to go from here.